Will a TV Town Turn Off the Tube?

What do parents really want to do about TV?

Do they like the TV industry’s age-based ratings to help them guard against objectionable programs? Or do they, as a coalition of child advocates, health and education professionals contend, prefer content labels? Or would they rather employ a media literacy strategy--watching with the kids and explaining every dramatic exaggeration, sexual innuendo and commercial manipulation they encounter?

Or do they just want to turn the whole thing off?

Judging from the number of people--an estimated 4 million--who have signed up for the third annual National TV-Turnoff Week, April 24-30, a good many seem to agree that the real problem isn’t necessarily what kids are watching. It’s how much.

Henry Labalme, executive director of TV Free America, the Washington, D.C., sponsor of the annual drive to turn off the tube, has concluded that Americans who live to 65 spend a total of nine years in front of a television, considering that the average person watches more than four hours of TV a day. That’s assuming that babies start watching four hours of TV the day they’re born. But even if he’s a little off, it’s probably not by much. Labalme also cites surveys in which the majority of children (54%), by the time they’ve been in the world four to six years, say they would rather watch TV than spend time with their fathers.

When they heard about TV-Turnoff Week, Joy Lewis and Jennifer Saitz, third-grade teachers at Windsor Hills Magnet School in Baldwin Hills, decided their students should participate. They contacted TV Free America and sent for its $10 organizer’s kit to help parents and teachers plan alternatives to TV watching for the week.

Lewis said her students spend so much time watching TV, they expect teachers to be as entertaining as a 30-minute sitcom.

“The kids know TV is an integral part of living,” she said. “It’s a serious problem.”

The mere thought of no TV has already sent the children into pangs of withdrawal, Saitz said. “About 90% were very upset, just thinking about it. . . . Half these kids don’t know the first thing about anything else to do.”

In the organizers’ kit, TV Free America suggests “almost anything else,” including daydream, go swimming, join a choir, invent something, watch a sunset or a sunrise.

The whole idea, Labalme says, is civic reengagement, reconnecting people with their families and communities, rather than zoning out alone on “Friends” and “Frasier.”

After a two-week effort at her children’s school, the Center for Early Education in West Hollywood, where children analyzed their viewing patterns before seeking alternatives, Los Angeles mother Nancy Stephens said “Some people found it incredibly difficult to do. Other parents said, ‘Thank you so much. I had no idea mornings could be so much easier without the TV.’ ”

Nancy Vinicor, a Los Angeles mother whose children are allowed only one hour of TV a week, said she’s had mixed results trying to get a group behind TV-Turnoff Week in West L.A., a place, she said, “where a lot of people work in the industry.”

Some of the most addicted are worried they’ll never make it alone.

DeAndre Matthews, 8, one of Lewis’ students, said he doubts he can hold out longer than two days. “It’s going to be rough,” agreed his father, Ellwood. “We’re a Laker household and the season ends in three or four games. It’s scary. What will I do?”

For more information, contact TV Free America at (202) 887-0436.

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Lynn Smith’s column appears on Sundays. Readers may write to her at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053 or via e-mail at lynn.smith@latimes.com. Please include a telephone number.